[consulting] Business questions

[sime]

Larry Garfield wrote:

Hi. I'm sure this is different for all, here is mine.

>How do you get most of your clients?  Do they come to you asking for a Drupal solution specifically, or do they come asking for a web solution and you sell them on Drupal?
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Mostly word of mouth. Well, I don't think my hacky old website brings 
anything in. Clients ask for solutions.  Developers ask for Drupal.

>Since Drupal is open source with a strong community behind it, how do you handle warranty support for a site?  Do you offer support yourself, or do you fall back on "there's a community, use it"?
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Assuming the customer is time-poor, they must understand that if they 
get a website with no support, it won't be successful. I expect them to 
pay a yearly support fee which gives them x hours of fixes, 
improvements, training.

If there are too many unknowns then I start to push for an ongoing fees, 
as it's the customer's choice to push the boundaries, they need to take 
financial responsibility. I don't rely on the community for any sort of 
direct support, unless they want to be *really* cheap. Obviously, some 
customers perceive the community as a bonus.

>If you have to build a completely new module for a site, or make significant changes to an existing module, how do you handle billing the client for that time?  How many places bill hourly vs. flat rate?  Do you include "submitting and refining" time for patches (contrib or core)?
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Unless contracted specifically, this will be in the quote. "Development 
of x and x". Or I build it into the "installation of module x" which is 
a varying price based on how stable I perceive the module to be. I often 
won't charge extra for ongoing bugfixes (other than the above mentioned 
support fees), as long as the customer agrees to GPL. Ultimately, there 
is a undisclosed buffer is my quotes for contingencies.

>Cheers!
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